Personal Pronoun Use in Community-College Student Writing: Developing an Academic Self

Olga D. LambertBenedictine University

Lisle, ILCCCC 2014: Indianapolis

Personal Pronoun Use in Speech and Writing

Frequent use of personal pronouns is an important feature of spoken discourse (Biber, 1988). In contrast, personal pronouns are rarely used in academic prose.

In written discourse, personal pronoun use is perceived by readers as a marker of a less formal tone and a closer reader-writer distance (Thayer et al., 2010).

Corpus-Based Studies of Personal Pronoun Use in Academic Writing

Most studies done on corpora of high-level academic writing

Hyland (2001): 240 published articles in 8 disciplines

Hyland (2002): 64 Hong Kong undergraduate theses by L2 writers

Harwood (2005): Qualitative analysis of 40 articles across 4 disciplines

First Person Pronoun Use in Academic Writing: Author's Presence and Competence

Hyland (2001) and Harwood (2005) found that authors of published academic articles use first person pronouns to establish credibility and membership in a disciplinary community.

In 2002, Hyland found that L2 undergraduate thesis writers underuse first person pronouns compared to the authors of the published articles in the 2001 study.

Personal Pronouns in Student Writing: A Gap in the Literature

Novice academic writers need to: Negotiate the spoken-written discourse

continuum Establish an appropriate academic self

Breeze (2007) examined a small sample of undergraduate student essays and reports Overuse of I and you in essays Use of we in reports shows awareness of different

academic genres and audiences More corpus-based studies of novice academic

writing are needed

The Present Study: Research Questions

Does novice academic writers' use of first and second person pronouns mirror spoken discourse or the conventions of academic prose?

Are there differences in the use of first and second person pronouns? In the use of singular (I, me, my) and plural (we, our) first person pronouns?

Have the patterns of personal pronoun use in student writing changed over time?

The Present Study: Research Questions

Does novice academic writers' use of first and second person pronouns mirror spoken discourse or the conventions of academic prose?

Are there differences in the use of first and second person pronouns? In the use of singular (I, me, my) and plural (we, our) first person pronouns?

Have the patterns of personal pronoun use in student writing changed over time?

Corpus and Method

Summaries and reviews of “Into the Electronic Millenium,” a chapter of Sven Birkerts's The Gutenberg Elegies, written by first-semester community college students between 1999 and 2013: the Gutenberg Elegies Corpus (GEC)

Roughly 140,000 words The frequencies of I, me, my, mine, we, us, our,

ours, you, your, and yours calculated in 1999-2000, 2003-2005, and 2012-2013 samples and standardized to occurrences/1,000 words (see Biber, 1988)

Working Hypotheses

Students' use of personal pronouns will be closer to spoken language than to academic writing

Students' use of I will increase over time while the use of we will decrease (a shift to greater orality)

“My sense is that there's a generational difference. I think the younger folk coming in now are more inclined to use the passive voice and I than they are to use we” (quoted in Harwood, 2006, p. 443)

Personal Pronoun Use: A Comparison of Biber's Data and

the GEC

First Person Pronouns: I, me, my,mine, we, us, our, ours

Second Person Pronouns: you, your, yours

Biber F-to-FBiber AP

1999-20002003-2005

2012-2013

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

57.9

5.7

30.84

23.15

29.4

Personal Pronoun Use: A Comparison of Biber's Data and

the GEC

The use of personal pronouns in the GEC represents a transitional stage between spoken discourse and formal academic prose

Frequencies of second person pronoun use are much closer to academic writing than spoken language

No evidence of a shift toward greater orality over time

1999-2000 2003-2005 2012-20130

5

10

15

20

25

10.038.77

10.36

20.81

14.38

19.04

Singular

Plural

First Person Pronouns in the GEC: Singular vs. Plural

First Person Pronouns in the GEC: Singular vs. Plural

In contrast to Breeze (2007), we is used much more often than I

Students are aware of some of the differences between academic and personal writing, and are attempting to imitate familiar genres of academic writing (i.e. textbooks)

Students are beginning to develop their academic selves

The changes in we need to be investigated further

We, Us, Our, Ours: Changes Over Time

Chi-square tests showed a statistically significant decrease in the use of plural first person pronouns between 1999-2000 and 2003-2005, then an increase between 2003-2005 and 2012-2013

1999-2000 vs. 2003-2005: χ2(df = 1) = 6.21 (p = 0.01)

2003-2005 vs. 2012-2013: χ2(df = 1) = 3.63 (p = 0.06)

Example 1: 1999

In his opinion, we have lost our individuality by becoming an electronic media society. We are following the masses that stare at a computer screen for long periods of time, isolated from all others. As a whole, according to Birkerts, we are no longer each individual person reading a well written book, but instead, a group of computer addicted fools. We have allowed the new way of learning push us away from the basic learning process and guide us toward the more electronic approach.

Example 2: 2005

Sven Birkert goes on to quote Historian Eric Havelock in saying "The basic shift from oral to literate cultures was a slow process". Which is true, but our methods of message transportation is much faster than that of the days of ancient Greece. In the every day modern world the faster and more efficiently you work and communicate the better off you will be. But are there limits on technology? Now a person can sit his/her bedroom to look up information for work or school instead of spending a day at the library. Heck you can even get a degree in the privacy of your own home and at your own pace.

Example 3: 2013

Into the Electric Millennium by Sven Birkerts really pinpoints the fade of the written word in today's society and how mass media is influencing that loss. With technology developing farther every single day, more and more aspects of our life are being made "easier" with technology, and more and more aspects of our life are being taken over by technology as it progresses into the future. One thing he really focuses on is how we aren't improving the process of things, but rather just finding different ways about going about them. He really feels that mass media is to blame for the radical decay of the written word.

References

Biber, D. (1988) Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge NY: Cambridge University Press.

Breeze, R. (2007). How personal is this text? Researching writer and reader presence in student writing

using WordSmith tools. CORELL: Computer Resources for Language Learning, 1, 14-21.

Harwood, N. (2005). “Nowhere has anyone attempted . . . In this article I do just that”: A corpus-based

study of self-promotional I and we in academic writing across four disciplines. Journal of

Pragmatics, 37, 1027-1031.

Harwood, N. (2006). (In)appropriate personal pronoun use in political science. A qualitative study and

a proposed heuristic for future research. Written Communication, 23(4), 424-450.

Hyland, K. (2001). Humble servants of the discipline? Self-mention in research articles. English for

Specific Purposes, 20, 207-226.

Hyland, K. (2002). Authority and invisibility: Authorial identity in academic writing. Journal of Pragmatics, 34, 1091-1112.

Thayer, A., Evans, M.B., McBride, A.A., Queen, M., & Spyridakis, J.H. (2010). I, pronoun: A study of

formality in online content. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 40(4), 447-458.